Where Liberalism Is Alive and Well!

Day: April 5, 2010

Republicans and many conservatives who no longer call themselves Republican live in a fantasy world that they have created and to some extent, the media has nurtured. I’ve typed before about how the pundits across the spectrum like to talk about what the American people want, usually based on a poll that often has questionable methodologies. For example, I saw a report the other day that said the president’s approval rating is at an all time low of 44%. It was a CBS poll and I had to scratch my head because I had heard other poll results that had him around 50% and higher in some. I saw the reason on the graphic on the screen, no explanation from the anchor, but 15% answered “Don’t Know”. Ahhhhh, the perfect example of how a question can yield different results depending on how it is asked. Those 15% who don’t know are the difference between claiming he is at an all time low and the actual number of people who voted for him in 2008, which was 53%.

This post isn’t about polls though, it’s about how Republicans want to distinguish between “real Americans” and the those who don’t really matter that much. Amanda over at Pandagon has an excellent post that I’m going to share with you. She sums it up better than I ever could.

Digby is amused/disgusted at conservatives who simply will not accept that having a majority in both houses of Congress and having the Presidency means that Democrats get to pass legislation. It’s been a common theme—making arguments about how “the people” don’t want this, arguments that imply that the Democrats got power by sneaking in and taking it without anyone noticing.

This next paragraph is where she nails it, in my opinion.

Well, it’s simple, really. They assume, if they don’t state it outright, that large numbers of American voters shouldn’t have the right to vote. That’s the implicit argument when Sarah Palin praises white rural voters as “Real Americans”, when Birthers obsess over the idea that the first black President simply can’t be eligible for office, when tea baggers yell racist and homophobic slurs at politicians, and when they insist that you eliminate black voters from the count if you want to find out how popular a politician “really” is. When Bart Stupak laughed out loud at the very idea that nuns have opinions worth listening to–and listed a bunch of men whose opinions were the ones that counted–you had a similar sentiment being expressed. Universal suffrage seems like a fundamental part of democracy to liberals, but it appears that conservatives think it de-legitimizes the results of elections. And that if you do something without Republicans on board, you’re eliminating those who represent the only people who count.

This phenomenon was perpetuated by the media during the election too, remember all the polls that were broken down by race. It was very obvious to me the prejudice being displayed by these “journalists” who acted like it was a real problem for President Obama. Some called it a white gap. Well, let me push back against these idiots, if you separate out the African American vote from any democratic candidate, guess what, you get the same results. African Americans see the democratic party as the only one that takes them into consideration, is concerned about issues that effect them. But my point is that they are just as much “American” as any in our country. While the media might have been wrapping themselves up in polls and demographics, they were not so subtly reinforcing the idea that some people matter more than others. You wonder where the anger comes from on the right, it’s because they really don’t accept that a black man can actually be president of the United States of America. Unpatriotic Mother-fuckers.